All Notebook Entries

According to Brazilian government records, President Lula da Silva's expected presidential decree authorizing decriminalization of drug users, the creation of safe-use rooms for injected drug users, and the change in the name of the lead agency from "National Anti-Drug Secretary" to "National Secretary about Drugs," was not issued on November 24th.

However, the national drug czar, General Paulo Uchoa, did give a media interview on Wednesday in which he said there will be safe-use houses for injected drug users established... but only in an "experimental" manner...

Let's read the tea leaves of the information that is available today...

On the weekend of December 10, 11 and 12th in Tijuana, Mexico - a conference will give people from North America the opportunity to hear, meet and discuss first hand with Cuban union leaders.

Also in attendence, the e-mail read, will be union leaders and organizers involved in Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, including Jacobo Torres de Leon, Coordinator of the Venezuelan Workers' Bolivarian Force (Fuerza Bolivariana de Trabajadores de Venezuela), and a lead organizer of the Million Worker March, Clarence Thomas.

11,468 computer viruses were eliminated in the space of one hour by VHeadline.com's firewall at around 7:00 p.m. New York time yesterday, November 22 ... the corporate enemy is becoming desperately dangerous ... all this reminds me of a fatally wounded man-eater that launches the barbaric "law of the jungle," that becomes more ferocious as it nears its inexorable demise.

What did the Fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Spain have in common? They consisted of a highly militarized state, backed by corporation and a wealthy elite, that rose to power through a false populism that exploited the publics fear of foreigners and moral degenerates. This precisely defines the formula that Karl Rove designed to consolidate the Bush administrations power in the recent election.

Tampa, Florida
I was covering the release of a report about the local effects of offshoring, otherwise known as outsourcing, which has become a big topic in the States this election year. Basically, because its so cheap for large companies to do business in other countries, millions of workers in the United States are either becoming unemployed, or are forced to work for sub-par wages and benefits. The 2-hour presentation centered on statistics, and came up with some decent solutions for making the US workforce more attractive to corporations---like better education. The goal of the discussion seemed to be how can we make it so that companies dont want to leave our state/country? But one man in the audience kept asking questions related to labor unions; questions that never really got answered.....

I received an email today from a producer of the "60 Minutes" TV news magazine program.

She wanted my "contacts" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - a city where I lived in for a good chunk of 2003 - to do a story on "Rio's out of control crime rate and drug problems."

And, oh, could I also provide her with translators because, she writes, "I cannot speak Portuguese so an English speaker would be great"?

I will publish the text of her email - and my response, in which I explain why the very premise of her story, and how she plans on doing it, will prevent it from telling the whole truth - below...

And I will explain to her (and to all) why the days when this project blindly helped Commercial Media correspondents with their projects, except under carefully specified and disclosed circumstances, are now over...

Al's hasta luego from Big Left Outside reminds us of the "continuing the battle South of the Border where we are moving toward authentic democracy rather than, as in the North, away from it.."
The mean little war criminal in the White House's handlers have reeminded him of it too. Frank Gaffney has outlined a 7-point "checklist." According to Portside, No. 7 is: "Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America"

Boston, Massachusetts, USA - "We have a public policy crisis: we are
spending billions of dollars to fight a war on drugs and we don't seem
to be able to stop the flow of drugs into this country. We are
spending more and more public dollars on housing men and women who are
involved with the drug trade, drug addiction seems to be increasing,
and yet we don't seem to have the money to help those who want to turn
their lives around and recover from addiction." With these words,
Boston City Councillor Chuck Turner started the public hearing to
investigate the war on drugs. He called the hearing "just the
beginning of a long dialogue in Boston to see how we can move
forward".

According to a report in today's Folha de São Paulo (subscription only), the government of Brazilian President Lula da Silva has reached a "consensus" to step forward into a bold new era of drug policy: decriminalizing the drug user, and opening 250 safe drug use centers across the country during the year 2005.

Lula is expected to sign an executive decree on November 24, taking drug enforcement responsibilities away from police agencies, and placing the problems of drug use under the jurisdiction of the Health Ministry, which will be charged with supporting the safe drug-use centers and make Harm Reduction - a policy to reduce the harms associated with drug use - the law of the land.

Here is an excerpt from today's report from Brazil's largest daily newspaper:

Policy proposal considers drug consumption as a public health problem, and no longer one for the police

After a series of internal disagreements about drug policy, the federal government is preparing a realignment of national policy to define drug consumption as a public health problem, and not one for the police as it is today.

There will be a presidential order creating rules for treating drug dependents, with emphasis on Harm Reduction...

In April of this year, Narco New brought you a gruesome story about corruption and murder along the Texas border. The story began as follows:

Between August 2003 and mid-January of 2004, a dozen people were murdered and buried in the yard of a house in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border city of 1.2 million people.

Santillan (an alleged leader in the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Juarez drug organization) and his cronies controlled the house. This group included the informant, known only as "Lalo," who was on the payroll of the U.S. Immigration and Customs (Enforcement) agency....

... The informant, Lalo, say the law enforcement whistleblowers, even brought the tape and the lime used to help dispose of the bodies. The law enforcement sources believe that he was at the death house during up to nine of the 12 murders known to have taken place there. Most of those killed were allegedly Mexican drug dealers, except for one individual, who was a U.S. citizen  "some kid from Socorro, Texas, just south of El Paso," says one law enforcement source.

What the Narco News story didnt mention in its April story was the name of the murdered kid from Socorro. He was Luis Padilla. He left behind a wife and three small kids.

Boston, Massachusetts, USA - Boston City Councillor Chuck Turner is calling for a public hearing this Monday to investigate the War on Drugs. The purpose of the November 15th hearing is to gather data on the resources devoted to the war on drugs by different city, state, and federal agencies...

With one of the first strategic military targets being a hospital so as to avoid pictures of civilians reduced to bits and pieces reaching the world and negatively impacting on Operation "Bomb 'em all into Oblivion," the razing to the ground of Fallujah ... the city of the "die-hard insurgents" and "home to absolute evil" ... has taken its course.

In a truly asymmetric "war," the American military has been using novel and devastating methods to clear Fallujahs streets. It has adapted a mine-clearing system, based on a rocket-propelled hose with explosives attached, used for the first time on D-Day on the fortified beaches of Normandy", as we learn from Times Defense editor, Michael Evans.

Marveling at the wonders of modern technology at the disposal of the American aggressor and the seamless transition from bomb-blasted streets to reality TV, war reporter James Hider describes how "the green video screen in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle is the ultimate in reality television, and that is how we watched the battle of Fallujah unfold as our 30-tonne steel beast advanced into the district of Jolan, the rebels' bastion, in the small hours of yesterday morning ... on a screen accurate enough to show rats scavenging on the rubbish piles."

A while ago, during the American elections, we quoted Orwell, warning the peoples of the USA about what Big Brother Bush and his fascist, military consorts have in mind for them, and for the rest of the world:

"We shall crush you down to the point, from which there is no coming back. ... Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.

Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

Every line of serious work that I write now is written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarian media and for the creation of democratic communication, as I understand it. (Yes, I'm attempting to rip off Orwell here.)

We may never know which candidate, Bush or Kerry, truly won the 2004 presidential election. And if you believe in any kind of democracy, that should really tick you off.

In 2000 we knew more people cast their ballots for Gore than Bush, both nationwide and in Florida. (Some 20,000 Jewish "Gore and Buchannan" votes, when they meant "Gore and Lieberman," easily swamps the phony 537 endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

This time, there's no way to recount half the votes cast in Florida on paperless touch-screen machines, and in both Florida and Ohio central tabulating computers could be rigged to give false vote counts. They may not have been, but they could have been, and there may be no way for us to know. That's a problem. Especially because there is reason to believe that key tallies are fraudulent.

For a quarter of a century, I spent ny whole youth in Apartheid South Africa, and have experienced what fascism is all about. My very birth was a "racial" scandal in "White" South Africa; my father, of British origin, was as "white" as snow, seen through "Boer" eyes, my mother, of indigenous descent, was as black as the night.

I was classified as "Colored", and was not accepted in any camp, across the "race" barrier. I suffered all the evils of Apartheid, even escaped attempts to assassinate me. The "Afrikaner" nazis who conquered political power in 1948, led by Malan's Nationalist Party, immediately applied what the architect of Apartheid, Verwoerd, had learned in "Duitsland".

I am not sure if this person has been discussed here but I thought it interesting enough to post and let y'all run with it.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon should be fairly famous to most people. Here is the Wikipedia file on him (although the neutrality of the article is "disputed" through the wikipedia system): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon

Exerpt:

"After the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea, Moon personally suffered the brutal excesses of North Korean communism and he found a fellow opponent of Communism in Ronald Reagan. Moon spent a billion dollars of church funds to support the conservative, influential Washington Times, which in 2002 he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world." And decades after Congressional scrutiny and a prison term for tax fraud, his generosity to the New Right (including opening an account for the "Contra" part of the Iran-Contra equation) has earned him a world of deference from his former enemies."

The main part of this post is below from a pretty famous webblog. So what do you think?

Between February and May of this year, Narco News published online, chapter by chapter, a book called Borderline Security: A Chronicle of Reprisal, Cronyism and Corruption in the U.S. Customs Service. The book was the culmination of a multi-year intensive investigation into the dysfunction and racism that pervades this nations federal law enforcement agencies. In particular, the book focuses on problems within U.S. Customs, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security mega-bureaucracy.

Narco News stepped out on a limb in agreeing to put the entire book on its site, but publisher Al Giordano and his compadres are not new to that game. They recognize that Borderline Security offers readers a crucial perspective on law enforcement in the United States with respect to the so-called war on drugs.

The decision by Narco News to run with Borderline Security, to get the book out to the people, takes on even more importance given the corporate culture that dominates the mainstream publishing industry. The lame conformist state of the book industry in this country probably comes as no surprise to many of you, but it is still a frustrating fact of life for any author who makes the decision to commit to a journalistic project that seeks to break new ground.

Mayor Marta Suplicy (of the Workers Party, or PT in its Portuguese initials) lost the elections in São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil with 11 million inhabitants, even as her government finished the term with the highest approval ratings in the history of the city. Based in social priorities, her government was built for the poor people in the peripheral regions of the city and emphasized public education and public transportation.

In the health sector Marta did a lot, but considering the debit of many years without priorities in health, that is the main problem in the City still.

The campaign of her adversary was based in the prejudice against a courageous female that has a very coherent way of life, including the decision to divorce the most popular Senator of Brazil (Eduardo Suplicy) at the beginning of her term, and to marry someone who she was in love with. All the big media in the country worked hard to improve the prejudice against her and to support her adversary.

Jose Serra, the former Minister of Health of Fernando Henrique Cardoso Government (PSDB  Social Democratic Party), won the election last Sunday. Serra is suitable for the fight against AIDS but is very conservative in fields like drugs and the Harm Reduction approach, or themes like gender or sexual orientation issues.

The second Bush term is going to make the first four years look like the good old days.

Now that the American president really was elected, his gnawing sense of illegitimacy removed, his father's curse exorcized, his religious right flank empowered, and a hesitant world now falling to its knees to bow before him, watch out.

During the first four years, he and his gang restrained themselves from fully unleashing the repressive measures of the Patriot Act, knowing that it could cost them the election. The restraints are now gone.

And other repressive policies like the drug war? Watch that get used, now, as politically as the terror war.

It's mourning in America. My mailbox runneth over today with emails from friends and strangers who want to leave the United States and come down here to Latin America.

Nobody should do that to run from a fight: After all, if you are a citizen of the U.S.A., there is no place to hide from your own country's foreign policy...

USA – Our democratic republic was car-jacked, beginning with the hot-wiring four years ago, and now we see most of our citizens just watch or cheer on the thieves. This country's going to be taken on a joy-ride and left trashed; don't doubt that.

But there's a lot left in this old gas-guzzling SUV of a nation worth saving, a hell of a lot of beautiful land and not a few wonderful people. And maybe, just maybe those of us stuck in the back will be able to distract the driver and his fellow hoodlums from their attempt to run over the innocent bystanders of this theft – the rest of the people in the world – even if we can't jam the gears.

Massachusetts liberals descended on New Hampshire this election day to help defeat court-appointed President Bush, and elect their own Senator Kerry. Some had arrived or commuted to New Hampshire to interview potential Kerry voters in the day or days before. A few paid co-ordinators had been working there for months.

The strategy was simple and built around the many volunteers MoveOn has available for short-term involvement but its limited resources for an extended field effort. First, identify people who aren't regular voters and who are fairly likely to support Kerry, meaning registered Democrats and Independents. Second, ask them if they support Kerry. Third, make sure that those who say they support Kerry vote.

Based on this reporters anecdotal impressions participating in this get-out-the-vote effort in a conservative, rural area about a half hour from Manchester, New Hampshire's allowance of same-day registration, its good voting equipment, and its well-run polling stations proved even more important for Kerry's victory in this state.

In previous commentaries we have underlined the emancipatory quintessence of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. We have explained why it is an emancipatory paradigm for all the exploited, dominated, discriminated and alienated peoples of the world.

Yesterday, once more, the Venezuelans have shown to the world, what the kratos (rule, government) of, by and for the demos (people), what real, true, democracy, that is, revolutionary emancipation, is all about.

With the new Eminem music video "Mosh", Marshall Mathers joins millions of people in the very active fight to end the most anti-democractic, corrupt, oppressive, and war-crazy (all at the same time, anyway) administration in United States history.

These millions include a few famous people who, like Mathers, have connected with large parts of the white population. The bad news is that the majority of whites in the United States would deliver George W. Bush unto themselves and the world again and again.

In 2002, publisher Al Giordano named Marshall Mathers, also known as Eminem, the Narco News Journalist-of-the-Year. Days before the election, Mathers leads the U.S. victims of the Bush administration to a rebellion by ballot, in a new video now playing (possibly edited) on MTV. The video, titled "Mosh," is the #1 most popular according to MTV.com.

Last August we reported that Narco News copublisher and journalist Stephen Flanagan Jackson had "gone to court seeking the lifting of a bizarre gag order imposed on Colombian miners, unions, and family members of those who were assassinated, in their lawsuit against the Drummond Company."

Oct. 29, 2004 -- An editor for a Latin American news Web site claimed victory Tuesday in his fight against a protective order forbidding anyone involved in a federal wrongful death suit against an American coal company over the killing of three workers in Colombia from talking about the case.

Stephen Flanagan Jackson, an associate editor for latinamericanpost.com, asked to intervene in the case in August after the trial judge imposed a broad gag order on all participants. Judge Karon O. Bowdre of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Ala., modified the order earlier this week so it now applies only to the attorneys involved.

"Her protective order was very broad and general, and it infringed on my rights as a member of the media and any individual's right to talk to me about the case," Jackson said in a telephone interview. The original order had a "chilling effect" on his sources and infringed on public's right to know about a very important case, he said...